Talking Typography Pt 3: The Kerning Curve
Oct
10
2008
Part 1 – Afterthought Typography, Blogs and Websites
Part 2 – Good Type Gone Bad, Tutorials and Tools
Part 3 – The Kerning Curve, Free Fonts and Other Resources
If the pen is mightier than the sword, then it would follow that the words flowing free from the pen are at the heart of it’s power. The same can be said of the words used in a design, and they need to be considered with the weight of importance they command. And it seems, most designers have this figured out.
The Kerning Curve
We couldn’t talk about typography and not mention the pet peeviest of careless mistakes that can turn truly tremendous type into a usability nightmare, that grants a carelessness to it’s character’s style. Improper kerning, or for that matter, not kerning at all creates an uneven appearance to your type, as the character spacing is not measured and fluid. Now we are not talking about tracking here, for there is a very distinctive, one daresay, artistic difference between the two.
You see, Tracking increases the space between all characters evenly, without pairing consideration being taken at all. Meanwhile, Kerning spaces based on character pairs, making sure that they line up well with each other, working harmoniously and not obtrusively. Kerning, as mentioned earlier, is the more artistic approach to the typography, giving it the sort of fluidity of handwritten text that is appealing to the eye. Though it may be more time consuming, creating a font should be given the precision and care of any creative endeavor, and the extra time will pay off with a spectacularly spaced type with a seamless style.
Now not all font makers take kerning into consideration when crafting their creation (though they should), so don’t take for granted when using a font, that you won’t need to do some manual adjusting and tweaking yourself to get a succinctly kerned type. Don’t think, if you aren’t crafting fonts that you don’t need to know about kerning characters. As a designer, each and every time you use a font in your work, you should be aware of and examining the character spacing to make sure you are not compromising the overall graceful motion of your work with the typography. So take the time for learning about kerning and it will pay off for your designs in the end.
Free Fonts
In this, the final installment of the series, we wanted to point you in the direction of some of our favorite haunts for finding free fonts (wow, that rhymed…just kidding that was totally intentional.). Whenever we are in need of an interesting font that won’t break our budget, these are the first cyberspace stops we make in our search!
Other Resources
We’ve gathered together some other random resources for you that didn’t necessarily qualify under some of the other headings we’ve had, but that we wouldn’t feel right about excluding from the series. So here they are in no particular order, some of the other typography resources we love so much!
Just Creative Design’s Type Classification Ebook
30 Inspiring Flickr Groups on Typography
Fuel Your Creativity’s Typography is Sexy Series – Part 2 – Part 3
The Principles of Beautiful Typography
101 Typography Resources for Web Designers
A Huge Roundup of Typography Blogs, Resources, Articles, Galleries & Tools
Inspirational Typography
Seeing as this the final segment, we felt that we would throw in an extra large dose of inspirational typography. We rummaged through the far reaches of the world wide web to collect more stunning examples to feature for you here. Enjoy, and thank you for checking out the series! Happy typographying…
A Final Word
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October 10th, 2008 at 11:00 am
great article, many useful resources! Thanks for giving FYC a shout too
October 10th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
These three are just great articles on typography with so many (more than) useful resources.
October 10th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Great type round-up, and I appreciate the mention of my site. Good luck.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:22 am
@ adelle, glad that you enjoyed it. And how could we not?
@Janko, we really appreciate it! Glad we could lead you to some good resources. We’ve found them so helpful!
@David, thanks! Not a problem on the mention at all. Thanks for the wonderful work you did.
October 12th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Excellent and very useful roundup. The inspirational works are amazing, especially the Gill sans and the oriental calligraphy, thanks a lot for sharing.
October 13th, 2008 at 6:59 am
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